If EA has followed their usual plan about releasing a new basegame every 5 years and announcing each new basegame about 15 months before their release then of course it will be TS5! ;)
Many simmers just don’t believe that because they think that TS4 still is missing all the “usual” EPs now that EA has replaced them with GPs and SPs instead. Beside that those simmers haven’t yet understood that it never was EA’s intention to just let TS4 become a new version of TS2 or TS3! Instead it always has been EA’s plan to let TS4 become a new and very different Sims game.
So EA planned to let TS4 even become a Sims game without toddlers and also without all the “traditional” EPs. It should be a new game and simmers who preferred the old style were expected to just still play TS3.
Later EA decided to release toddlers anyway though because the sales numbers for TS4 had been disappointing. So has EA also changed the plan about not releasing EPs like Seasons or University? I don’t know. But EA still mainly wants to release SPs and GPs because their low prices make them sell better and because they are much cheaper for EA to make. Also I am quite sure that EA wants the GPs to have mainly new content instead of becoming reduced versions of traditional EPs. But anyway all the traditional reasons why EA wants a new basegame to be released every 5 years are still clearly valid (mainly an old basegame not appealing to new simmers, new packs for an old basegame selling less and less and EA being unable to discount old packs without hurting the sales numbers for new packs). So unless EA really wants to stop the whole series soon I can’t see why EA shouldn’t announce TS5 in the middle of 2018 and release it about 15 months later as usual?
